A Historical Perspective on Childhood: Kindergarten arrives in Japan

A School of Education Seminar held on 14 August 2019, presented by Dr Yukiyo Nishida

This presentation is about childhood in history and how it is socially constructed. Views about childhood have changed over time and will continue to change. Childhood is not only defined by biology but also by a particular society and at a particular time, which presents the values, attitudes, beliefs, and views that society holds regarding children and childhood. Therefore, throughout this presentation, I will discuss how our values and ideas about childhood have been socially constructed, especially through characteristically modern ideas about the nation-state, education, and childhood in the case of 19th-century Japan. I will focus on how views and values about childhood were transformed after Friedrich Froebel’s (1782-1852) kindergarten system was transferred to Japan, and how his theory was translated when the kindergarten system arrived in Japan in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The keywords for this study are “transfer”, “translation”, and “transformation”, and considering these in turn usefully illustrates some cross-cultural contexts of childhood both across time and geography.

Presentation